The Lost and the Damned
by Gehenna79
Summary: Many years after the Capitol has been overthrown, a Hunger Games victor from District 9 tells his life story, centered around the Games that changed his life forever.


**The Hunger Games: The Lost and the Damned**

**I.**

* * *

District 9.

That's where I grew up. It feels weird to be talking about it from the outside, as it is when you talk about any place that is that connected to you, so much a part of your identity, but the true fact is that I do not live there anymore. Now, I live where the Old Capitol used to be, where Snow's old regime used to be. But that time is over. Many years ago, the opulence and corruption of that regime proved too much of a weight for the scales of power to balance, and in the end, the rebels of District 13, with the help of many other Districts, overthrew President Snow. Then, the leader of the Rebels herself was killed, killed by her poster-child, the Victor of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen. That was thirty-five years ago.

As for who I am, well I am Joseph Conrad. I am nearing the end of my life, and I thought it would be prudent to write it down, not only to keep myself from thinking over things too much, but also as sort of a way to impart, (hopefully) a lesson to my desendants who read it. Basically, its an autobiography, or an extended set of memoirs. If anyone actually does read this, well then hats off to you, for having the free time to read an old man's dying thoughts, for that, I applaud you and award you a sticker. What makes me special enough to warrant writing a memoir, you ask? Well, why do you need to be special to write one in the first place? Can not a man who has lived and known life have that as good enough of a reason? No, you say? Well then, I suppose the next sentence would surprise you.

I was a Victor of the Hunger Games.

District 9 had only four Victors, and I was the fourth, and final. I am also the only one living at the moment too, though for a while, I had at least one steadfast companion that I will mention later. And for the most part, that will be the primary focus of my story. Of course, I will go into what happened later, and the small, negilible part I played in the Rebellion, but that is by far the most important part. As for the title, well, as you will see, after I won the Hunger Games, it did not feel so much like a victory anymore. I indeed, felt Lost and Damned. But more on that later.

Any story must start at the beginning, and this will be no different. Let us go back to 35 ADD, when I was born, and maybe you will understand...

* * *

I was born Joseph Hector Conrad, the second, (and Last) child of Maria and Adam Conrad. My other sibling was Janessa, and she was older than me by five minutes. We were technically twins, though I never see it that way. If she was born five minutes earlier, than that makes her older. We just happened to share the same living space in our mother. For a while after my victory over the Hunger Games, me and my sister did not speak, for many, many years actually, not until quite recently, when she passed away. This happened simply because I felt betrayed that she did not volunteer to take my place, along with the fact that she knew little of how I felt, and expected I should be happier to have survived and won the main prize. But alas, I digress, and more on that later.

If you could not tell, I say the phrase, "more on that later" quite a bit, and apologize for this beforehand.

My father was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with thick, dark hair, sun-beaten skin like old leather, large, gentle hands, and hairy arms, like a gorilla, a creature that I still today believe is made up, since nobody can prove that they exist. My mother was small, petite, and had a cultural background described during the pre-Panem days as "Asian", therefore she aged very slowly. Her hair was black as well, and she had paler skin than my father.

According to my father, they had never planned to have kids. The idea that they would have kids that could be eligible for the Hunger Games was appalling to them. But accidents happen, not that he regretted our existence, but instead he regretted the shame of bringing us into a world where such fear loomed over our lives. In our District, like most, abortion is completely outlawed, as there has to be some pool of contestants for the games. So we were born, and brought into the world, more meat for the slaughter, so to speak.

Oh, I remember my twelfth year alright. All year, I was in fear, anything that moved made me jump, and I was constantly plagued by nightmares. My first Reaping, when I realized that I was not going to be sent off to die for the entertainment of over twenty-five million people across the nation, all that fear was pulled off, and the Hunger Games became somewhat of just a looming threat, that was only fully appreciated when it came close around the corner. I would be depressed for two weeks, then realize I was alive, and then feel like nothing had happened whatsoever. I was so selfish, not even thinking about the needs and the feelings of those who had actually been chosen, and because of that, I think maybe the Universe felt the need to teach me a lesson. I carry my mother's spiritual beliefs, and she was a Naturalist, believing in the Universe as her main spiritual Deity.

For the most part, my childhood was fine. In our District, our lives revolve around the production of grain, wheat to be accurate. We are the Capitol's breadbasket, so to speak, and therefore all we ever needed to learn in school was basic math, English, history, and how to be productive during the summer harvest.

According to historians, before Panem, children got summer vacation because they needed a break. We got summer vacation so we could help harvest the wheat. And boy, was there a lot of it.

On July the 1st, we would all ship out in a large convoy of trucks from the main city, known to the non-Peacekeepers as Baker's Cross. The trucks were like large, brown jugs of water, with box fronts, dirt smeared on the hoods and front windows. We would all sit in the back and sing songs and play games, and then after an hour, we would be at our destination, unpacking our living quarters. During the summer, from July to mid-September, we would live in canvas tents.

Each tent was white, and contained a floor and a tarp for when it rained. There was also mosquito netting thankfully, so the bugs were not a problem at least. Some people got to live in tin-roof huts that had water inside them, but we were never that lucky. All our water came from a metal pump in the middle of our convenient circle. We cooked our meals by the fire. This was the only time of the year where meat was readily available, as we could cook any of the pests and large animals we came across in the fields. You would not believe it, but sometimes deer would come near the perimeter, and then someone, even I did this once, would shoot it down with a rifle, skin it, get the good parts, and roast it for summer. There were also stewed rat, and my personal favorite, pheasant, which tastes good roasted, a pinch of salt added to it.

The first steps of the Harvest was to of course, harvest the wheat. In the old days, according to the school books, there had been machines known as "Combine Harvesters" to do the work of harvesting work for you. For years, ever since I left the Capitol, I have wondered why the Capitol has not reproduced these wondrous machines. Because there were none available for us to use, we had to make do with scythes. A person from outside the District can not even imagine how long this takes, considering the amount of wheat we have to cut. There was also the job of processing it, removing the grains from the stalks, as well as converting into flour. Once the flour was sent to the large, metal silos that gleamed in the morning sun, well, they would get moved with us on the trucks to the factories, where they would be processed further, and either sent to the capitol as flour or bread, or allocated to use. About fifteen percent of all grain harvested is given to us. To most, this might be considered a lot, since in other agricultural districts, like District 11 or 10, they don't get any of their product at all, but this really was the minimum amount. There is such a huge population in District 9, that not providing grain to feed their people would not do, so the Peacekeepers begrudgingly allowed access to fifteen percent of it. The exact number is not known, but it is guessed that during my time, that there were over a million people living in District 9.

Life in the camps was not depressing, in fact, other than the back-breaking work, it was probably the highlight of our year. The threat of the Hunger Games had passed, we were now among friends, and were all unified in one goal; to get the Harvest over as quickly as possible. On the one day of the week we got off, we would all gather around and cook a community meal, sing songs, play games, and even one year, we recreated an ancient sport known as "soccer", that we figured out the rules of from an old textbook somebody found in ancient ruin north of the main fields. This sport kept us very entertained, and smiling, a fact that make the Peacekeepers doubly angry. They could not break our spirit, no matter what, and to that, it felt like a defeat. They would just be looking at you the next day, to make up a reason for you to get flogged or waterboarded, but we would give them no reason to.

Life back in the city however, was not the same. In fact, it was probably worse. During the fall, winter, and spring, we lived in a crowded tenement, with two other families. Me and my sister had to share the top level of the bunk bed, which may seem weird to some, but it was a fact of life. Other boys at school would always laugh and joke that I "slept" with my sister. The thought made me laugh too, for some reason, and I was not easily offended, so that could probably be why. But, I digress.

My mother and father slept below us. On the other side of the room were four boys, all the children of one other family, the Masons, who couldn't stop having kids. They had a fifth boy as well, who slept in the other room. There was William, my best friend, and then there was his younger brothers, Thomas, Marcus, Brian and Jason. Then the second other family that lived with us consisted of Shirley Jackson and Ryan Jackson, and they had only one daughter, Josephine. The year after I came back from winning the Hunger Games, there was scandal in our building (though I did not live in the Building anymore, I was given my own penthouse) as Josephine became pregnant and admitted to having slept with both Thomas and another boy named Flint from the other tenements across the street. How she had time and where she did this, was the question I was always asking. There was no way of confirming the child's father, so the child was officially listed as "fatherless" on the government papers, I learned.

God, do I like to ramble on about nothing, please forgive me.

* * *

During the non-harvest months, we went to school five days a week, except during the two to three weeks that the Hunger Games usually airs on television. How did the events of the Games themselves actually affect me you ask? Well, I found them to be exciting, and that is one of my greatest shames. It all seemed like some great game, something that would surely never happen to me. I could honestly say that when I was picked at the Reaping, which I will cover in the next chapter, I did not have many skills at all to effectively believe that I would win the game. The only attributes that I had were my strength, and my ability to outwit people through speech, which as you will see, got me out of a troublesome spot, and was the turning point of the Games for me.

During school, as I mentioned before, we learned math, English, history, loyalty to the capitol etc. I made some good friends, William I mentioned, but there was also Peter, Brian (Bush, not William's brother), Samson, Sheila, Rhea, Saturn, and Suzanne. Like my sister, I became estranged from most of them after I won the games; unable to believe that they did not even try and help me. But as I grew up, I realized the blank truth of: what were they supposed to do? They had families of their own, they had a right to live just as much as I, and so I expected too much of them. That is a major flaw of being human, I believe; we expect too damn much.

And so that was my blissful, ignorant life before Reaping day. Summers filled with work and friendship, the rest of the year filled with work and friendship, though much drearier. I have not yet described what the city of District 9 looks like. All I can say about it is that it is a skeleton; a skeleton of something long dead or dying. The city is made up of old buildings, their splendor long gone, looking as if they are now made of ash. They stand on a carpet of rubble, some of it cleared off to make streets, others not so much. There is dirt and grime everywhere, everything seems rundown and rusty. It is not a place I really like to revisit much in my dreams; not like District 4, where you can see the sea and smell the ocean spray, hear the rush of the waves and the caw of the seagulls. Whoever lives there is blessed.

But I was blessed too; my life was far easier than others.

Ask Katniss Everdeen, she'll set you straight.

* * *

**Author's Note: The Hunger Games that Joseph won was the 51st, the year after Haymitch won, Second Quarter Quell.**


End file.
